Noisy America, Quiet France

Campaign posters in France the week before the election.CreditCreditClaude Paris/Associated Press..

To Americans who vividly remember the nonstop coverage of the leak of Hillary Clinton’s emails, the silence in France last weekend about leaked emails of the Emmanuel Macron presidential campaign — imposed by law and willingly accepted by the news media — seemed not just curious but undemocratic. What kind of democracy would limit the press on so big a story on the eve of so important an election?

It turns out that not only France, but quite a few democracies have election coverage restrictions, like bans on the release of polling data. In the United States, the only related restriction is a ban on electioneering within 100 feet of a polling place.

In France, word of the online dump of Macron emails spread through alt-right blogs and social media on Friday, two days before the election, which Mr. Macron won handily. The Macron campaign rushed out a statement at 11:56 p.m. denouncing a “massive and coordinated” hacking attack. Four minutes later the blackout requirement took effect.

That was about all that the French heard of the leak, at least in the French media, until the polls closed at 8 p.m. Sunday. Any activity that could affect the outcome of the election — campaign events, articles about the race, postings on social media — could draw steep fines.

In the view of the national election commission, the hacked emails were very much the sort of information that the law barred, especially since the Macron campaign charged that fake emails were mixed in with real ones.

The French law, called a “période de réserve électorale,” or “silence electoral,” began as a way to ensure that the government couldn’t meddle in an election, and over the years it came to apply to political communications of any kind. Needless to say, plenty of French-language information is available from outside France, but the French and their media generally accept the official argument that voters should have a period of reflection before casting their ballots.

After the last American election, frenzied to the end, a period of rumination in the homestretch has a certain allure. But that is unlikely in a country with the protections of the First Amendment, and, besides, there’s reason to wonder whether the leaked emails constituted electoral noise or newsworthy material. The early word is that it’s pretty mundane stuff. The big question now is whether Russia was behind it.